The National Origins of Policy Ideas: Knowledge Regimes in the United States, France, Germany, and Denmark

Summary

In politics, ideas matter. They provide the foundation for economic policymaking, which in turn shapes what is possible in domestic and international politics. Yet until now, little attention has been paid to how these ideas are produced and disseminated, and how this process varies between countries. The National Origins of Policy Ideas provides the first comparative analysis of how "knowledge regimes"—communities of policy research organizations like think tanks, political party foundations, ad hoc commissions, and state research offices, and the institutions that govern them—generate ideas and communicate them to policymakers.

John Campbell and Ove Pedersen examine how knowledge regimes are organized, operate, and have changed over the last thirty years in the United States, France, Germany, and Denmark. They show how there are persistent national differences in how policy ideas are produced. Some countries do so in contentious, politically partisan ways, while others are cooperative and consensus oriented. They find that while knowledge regimes have adopted some common practices since the 1970s, tendencies toward convergence have been limited and outcomes have been heavily shaped by national contexts.

Drawing on extensive interviews with top officials at leading policy research organizations, this book demonstrates why knowledge regimes are as important to capitalism as the state and the firm, and sheds new light on debates about the effects of globalization, the rise of neoliberalism, and the orientation of comparative political economy in political science and sociology.

Table R.1. National Characteristics of Four Knowledge Regimes, 2008–2009 217

Acronyms

UNITED STATES

Preface

Although we did not realize it at the time, this project began when we decided during a quiet stroll along the Danish sea coast in 2004 to write a short paper about the role of ideas in public policymaking. Since then it has taken us to 11 cities in four countries. During our travels we had the pleasure of talking with many fascinating people and dining in many wonderful restaurants and cafes. We met some of the smartest people in politics as well as a few of the most paranoid. Our interviews with them were so riveting that in one case we lost track of time and missed our train back to Copenhagen, much to the amusement of those we were interviewing at the moment. We survived a restaurant fire and witnessed a street brawl. We watched pickpockets plying their trade in the Paris subway. We sat at the conference table used by Jean Monnet when he planned for the European Coal and Steel Community after the Second World War. We raced along the German autobahn one dark and rainy night at 125 miles per hour while the taxi driver flashed his lights and cursed cars in front of us for not going faster! We saw a couple dozen enormous tractors block traffic outside Christian Democratic Union headquarters in Berlin as farmers protested CDU agricultural policies. We passed through countless security check points in Washington, D.C. We visited the White House. We saw the parade grounds in Nuremberg where Hitler addressed mass rallies during the heydays of the Third Reich and where the Allies later held the Nazi top brass for trial and eventual execution. And along the way we collected and processed 15,000 or more pages of interview transcripts and documents. In the end we tried to write a book that will be of interest to a wide range of readers in the social sciences and beyond who are curious about how ideas are produced and disseminated to policymakers and used to affect public policy.

Many people helped us along the way. They include Magnus Paulsen Hansen, Antje Vetterlin, Magali Gravier, Vivien Schmidt, and Mogens Lykketoft who helped arrange interviews for us, as did the German and French embassies in Copenhagen and the Danish embassy in Berlin. Charles Quincy, Jordan Osserman, Jaclyn Wypler, Andreas Birkbak, Noah Glick, and John Mei helped gather, code, and organize data from websites, interviews, and organization documents. Mike Massagli, Gretchen Wright, Peter Marsden, Kathryn Lively, and Kathleen Sherrieb offered sage advice about developing coding schemes. Anne Ivey, Stephanie Morgan, Deborah Edwards, and Bo Bøgeskov were an enormous help when it came to managing the project’s funding.

We owe special thanks to everyone who agreed to be interviewed for this project and especially those who agreed to read and give us feedback on the chapters for which we interviewed them once they had been written. Because some of them preferred not to be identified, we refrain from reporting their names here. Nevertheless, this project would not have been possible without their generosity and help, for which we are extremely grateful.

We thank as well a number of people who commented on various aspects of this project along the way or provided comments on drafts of chapters and in some cases the entire manuscript. These include Denise Anthony, Edward Ashbee, Mark Blyth, Susana Borrás, Robert Boyer, David Brady, Marc Dixon, Marie-Laure Djelic, Francesco Duina, Marion Fourcade, Mauro Guillén, Peter Hall, Peter Katzenstein, Patrick Le Galès, Kathryn Lively, Cathie Jo Martin, Bruno Palier, Martin Møller Boje Rasmussen, Andrew Rich, Ann Sa’adah, Vivien Schmidt, Len Seabrooke, Kathleen Sherrieb, Diane Stone, David Strang, Wolfgang Streeck, Ruy Teixeira, and Kathleen Thelen. Special thanks go to three reviewers—John A. Hall, Nick Ziegler, and Elizabeth Popp Berman—who provided extensive and extremely helpful comments on an early version of the full manuscript. And, of course, we would be remiss not to thank Eric Schwartz, our editor at Princeton University Press, who helped guide the project to its completion. We benefitted as well from presenting portions of the analysis in seminars at the Social Science Research Council in New York City, Dartmouth College, Boston University, Duke University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, CEPREMAP, Alborg University, Copenhagen University, Krakow University, Hokkaido University, Columbia University, Brown University, McGill University, University College–Dublin, Sciences Po, Koç University, the Australian National University, and the Copenhagen Business School. We benefitted tremendously from a manuscript review seminar sponsored by the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth, for which we owe special thanks to Ken Yalowitz and Christianne Hardy Wohlforth.

Financial support was provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation (SES-0813633), the Copenhagen Business School through its World Class Project funds, the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth College, and the Department of Business and Politics (formerly the International Center for Business and Politics) at the Copenhagen Business School. In a similar vein, special thanks go to Finn Jung Jensen, former president of the Copenhagen Business School, and Alan Irwin, Dean of Research at the Copenhagen Business School.

Finally, we must thank our wives, Kathy Sherrieb and Anne Bøttger. They provided more moral support to us than we probably deserved throughout this project. For these and many other reasons we dedicate this book to them with much love and affection.

THE NATIONAL ORIGINS OF POLICY IDEAS

CHAPTER

1

Knowledge Regimes and the National Origins of Policy Ideas

Two conservative congressional staff members in Washington, D.C., Ed Feulner and Paul Weyrich, were frustrated in 1971 by the lack of timely policy-relevant research on Capitol Hill. Their frustration peaked when an impressive and potentially influential briefing paper about the supersonic transport prepared by a prominent conservative think tank arrived a day after Congress voted on the issue—too late to influence the vote. Frustration led to action. In 1973, with the help of wealthy benefactors like the beer tycoon Joseph Coors, they established the Heritage Foundation, an aggressive policy research organization dedicated to quickly producing and disseminating conservative policy analysis to members of Congress so that conservative ideas would have greater influence on policymaking. It worked. Notably, in 1980 the Heritage Foundation provided Edwin Meese, the head of Ronald Reagan’s transition team, a hefty volume called Mandate for Leadership, a conservative blueprint for transforming all aspects of public policy and intended as a guide for the incoming administration. It was a best seller in Washington for weeks and reputedly guided the administration’s initial budget cutting efforts at a time when conservatives believed that excessive government spending was causing inflation and economic malaise in America. The Heritage Foundation’s reputation soared, marking the beginning of a seismic change in how policy research organizations operated in Washington.¹

Since then and thanks to challenges associated with the rise of globalization and the transformation of advanced capitalism, policy research organizations in the United States and Europe have undergone major changes as people have tried to use policy analysis and other ideas to more effectively influence policymaking and solve national economic problems. But they have done so in nationally specific ways. This book explains these changes as they unfolded in the United States, France, Germany, and Denmark. In doing so it answers several pressing yet much neglected questions: Where do the ideas come from over which policymakers fight and that affect policymaking and public debates? How has this changed with the onset of globalization? And, most important, how has all of this varied across different types of advanced capitalist countries? In short, this book is about the national origins of policy ideas. Its arguments bear directly on critical debates about the nature of globalization, the rise of neoliberalism, the orientation of comparative political economy, and fundamental theories of organizational and economic sociology.

Researchers in the social sciences have long debated whether policy analysis, economic theories, and other sorts of ideas as well as self-interests affect policymaking in advanced capitalist countries. Many now agree that ideas matter a lot. Peter Hall, for instance, showed that big intellectual policy paradigms like Keynesianism and then neoliberalism shaped economic policy after the Second World War. Mark Blyth revealed how policymakers used ideas as weapons in their political struggles to reform taxation and government spending. Frank Dobbin argued that deep-seated values regarding the appropriate relationship between the state and economy influenced the development of national transportation policies. And others, particularly Vivien Schmidt, explained that cognitive and discursive structures helped frame policy debates in different ways in different countries.²

We accept that ideas matter for politics. Our concern, however, is that those who have shown that ideas are important have paid remarkably little attention to how these ideas are produced and disseminated in the first place and how this varies across countries and over time. So this book is not about how ideas matter or why policymakers choose one idea over another. It is about the organizational and institutional machinery by which these ideas are produced in different ways in different countries. This is especially important because variation in this machinery helps explain how policy ideas themselves differ across time and place. To our knowledge this is the first study of its kind.

The book focuses on how policy research organizations like think tanks, government research units, political party foundations, and others that produce and disseminate policy ideas are organized, operate, and have changed during the past 30 years or so in our four advanced capitalist countries. In each country these organizations constitute what sociologists call an organizational field—a community of organizations whose participants engage in similar activities and interact more frequently with one another than with organizations outside the field.³ We call fields of policy research organizations and the institutions that govern them knowledge regimes. Knowledge regimes are the organizational and institutional machinery that generates data, research, policy recommendations, and other ideas that influence public debate and policymaking.

Policymakers need the information produced by knowledge regimes insofar as the policy problems they confront often involve ambiguity and uncertainty. They need it to make sense of these problems. Sense making is often a contested process involving varying degrees of competition, negotiation, and compromise—often involving power struggles—over the interpretation of problems and solutions for them. A knowledge regime, then, is a sense-making apparatus.⁴ Just as sense making occurs in different ways in organizations depending on how they are organized individually, it also occurs in different ways in knowledge regimes depending on how they are organized as a field. Sense making is especially important and difficult for policymaking during periods of crisis when ambiguity and uncertainty are extreme because problems are unfamiliar and conventional policy prescriptions no longer work. During periods of crisis sense making can take a long time and may involve changing the sense-making apparatus itself.⁵ This is just what happened in nationally specific ways in our four knowledge regimes beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Analytic Arguments

Our overarching argument is that policy ideas have national origins and the way they are produced is largely determined by nationally specific institutions. In substantiating this claim, however, we offer four additional analytic arguments. The first three provide new insights into previous research on globalization and the rise of neoliberal ideas, comparative political economy, and organizational convergence. As we are about to explain, we identify and begin to fill important gaps in these three overlapping research literatures and challenge some of their key claims. The fourth analytic argument constitutes our causal model of the national construction of knowledge regimes. Our interest in these things stems from our long-standing curiosity about institutions and institutional change.⁶

The End of the Golden Age and the Rise of Globalization and Neoliberalism

Sense making and knowledge regimes became especially important in advanced capitalist countries during the era of economic globalization whose onset was marked by the end of the Golden Age of postwar capitalism—a period of strong economic growth, welfare state development, and general prosperity enjoyed by many advanced capitalist countries during the first three decades after the Second World War.⁷ The end of the Golden Age was accompanied by the onset of a stagflation crisis where economic stagnation and inflation increased simultaneously during the 1970s and 1980s. We will have more to say about this later in the chapter. But for now what is important is that stagflation discredited conventional Keynesian policy ideas in many advanced capitalist countries and triggered what some have called a war of ideas in North America and Europe in which political opponents used theories, data, ideology, and rhetoric as weapons in the fight over economic policy.⁸ These ideas varied widely from left to right across the political spectrum and across countries and were all attempts to make sense of this unprecedented situation.⁹ Among them, neoliberalism—the call for less public spending, lower taxes, especially on business and the wealthy, and less state intervention into the economy—figured prominently. And once ideas like these were adopted they had far-reaching consequences for how successfully economies performed.¹⁰

Much attention has been paid to globalization and the end of the Golden Age and how it transformed the advanced capitalist countries after the 1970s thanks to pressures associated with increased international capital mobility, new telecommunications technologies, the emergence of free-trade zones like the European Union, and more. New forms of economic organization resulted, such as the emergence of global outsourcing, international commodity chains, and network-like corporate structures.¹¹ New economic and social policies appeared too, including sometimes the scaling back of welfare states and tax burdens.¹² What is missing in this literature, however, is attention to the rise of knowledge regimes as a means of searching for new ideas about how to make sense of and cope with globalization and its challenges. For instance, David Held and colleagues’ well-known Global Transformations offered an impressive analysis of how globalization caused a variety of political, economic, and cultural changes around the world. But they provided little discussion—or even recognition—of where the ideas came from with which people tried to make sense of these changes.¹³

Following Max Weber, who argued that ideas are an important starting point for the development of capitalism, we argue that knowledge regimes became more important for advanced capitalist countries as policymakers and others grappled with the challenges of globalization.¹⁴ Put differently, this is an age when policymakers strive to recognize and improve their country’s institutional competitive strengths and rely increasingly on the production of policy-relevant knowledge to do so.¹⁵ This is why overlooking the significance and transformation of knowledge regimes is a serious omission in the research on globalization and the end of the Golden Age. By correcting this we illuminate a previously unexplored dimension of the breakdown in consensus on economic management that followed the end of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s and the demise of the Golden Age.

But the manner in which knowledge regimes help policymakers make sense of and deal with the challenges of globalization varies across countries. This is important for understanding the international diffusion of neoliberalism. Several scholars have argued that neoliberal ideas diffused internationally since the end of the Golden Age as globalization began to occur. In particular, researchers have claimed that this resulted in tendencies toward international convergence on a common set of political and economic outcomes, such as certain forms of market reregulation and welfare retrenchment.¹⁶ As Frank Dobbin and his colleagues remarked with reference to the globalization literature, The power of global models is increasingly taken for granted even in studies focusing on domestic economic and political conditions.¹⁷ We offer two arguments in this regard. First, we challenge albeit cautiously that neoliberalism is as taken for granted today as many believe. We show that the adoption of neoliberalism at least by national councils of economic advisors was highly uneven across our four countries and in one case was largely rejected. Second, although some researchers have also noted this sort of unevenness they attributed it to the fact that neoliberal ideas were translated (or not) into local practice by way of political and economic institutions already in place. In other words, national political-economic factors mediated the degree to which neoliberalism was adopted from one country to the next. We argue, however, that the structure and practices of knowledge regimes—not just political and economic institutions—also had important mediating effects. This is because knowledge regimes are where neoliberal ideas were often formulated and debated, and because the nationally specific organization of knowledge regimes affected how these and other ideas were crafted in the first place. This leads to our second argument—one that bears directly on literature in comparative political economy and the issue of national diversity.

Comparative Political Economy

Knowledge regimes are just as important for modern political economies as policymaking and production regimes at least insofar as knowledge regimes produce the ideas that inform what political and economic elites do. However, policymaking and production regimes have received the lion’s share of attention from comparative political economists. Much of their work dwells on how policymaking and production regimes respond to globalization in nationally specific ways. This work emerged in two waves. The first was about policymaking regimes, which were scrutinized closely in the 1980s and 1990s by social scientists like Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, whose volume Bringing the State Back In set the tone for much of this research.¹⁸ Policymaking regimes involve the organization and governance of states, political parties, and other political institutions. They vary across countries in many ways. For instance, policymaking is more centralized bureaucratically in some policymaking regimes than others. Elections are based on winner-take-all rules in some policymaking regimes but proportional representation in others. In turn, some policymaking regimes feature considerably more political parties and tend more toward compromise than others. And some policymaking regimes rely more heavily on the career civil service than others. Research shows that all of these factors influence how policy is made and contributes to different national styles of policymaking.¹⁹

The second wave in comparative political economy involved the analysis of production regimes. It emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s thanks largely to the emergence of the so-called Varieties of Capitalism School, pioneered by Peter Hall and David Soskice, who wanted to bring the analysis of firms back into comparative political economy. Their edited collection Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage remains the classic statement of this perspective. They assert that the important roles of firms and other economic actors were overshadowed for years in comparative political economy by studies of policymaking regimes. Production regimes involve the organization of economic activity through markets and other market-related institutions, which govern the interrelationships among firms, customers, employers, employees, and owners of capital. Some production regimes are dominated by large firms while others are dominated by small and medium-sized firms. Some firms are owned by families, others by diverse shareholders, and still others in part by the state. Some firms depend on equity and bond markets for finance while others depend on banks or the state. Some production regimes have strong unions, employer associations, and corporatist bargaining while others do not.²⁰ Researchers demonstrated that all of these factors influenced how well national economies adjusted to economic challenges, problems, and crises.

One of the most important contributions of the Varieties of Capitalism School was to show that different institutional combinations sometimes create synergies that help improve overall economic performance in ways that would not happen otherwise. Such synergy is typically called institutional complementarity. Generous universal welfare state provisions, for instance, may enhance labor market flexibility such that the political institution helps improve the performance of the economic institution. Not all institutional combinations do this.²¹ Robert Boyer is one of the few to argue that complementarities sometimes break down as circumstances change and institutional combinations become dysfunctional. Nor in his view are institutional complementarities necessarily self-evident; sometimes they must be discovered much as investors spot opportunities for arbitrage—all of which is to say that institutional complementarities are often as much a matter of perception and intentional action as they are of institutional structure per se.²²

Comparative political economists now often characterize national political economies in terms of combinations of different types of policymaking and production regimes and the institutional complementarities they entail.²³ And their work has provided countless insights into how advanced political economies operate. But they err in ignoring the important role that knowledge regimes play in all of this. After all, policymakers use the ideas emanating from knowledge regimes to formulate and implement the public policies that affect how production regimes are organized and operate and, in turn, how successful they are.²⁴ It stands to reason, then, that knowledge regimes may constitute an additional source of institutional complementarity insofar as the analysis and advice they generate help leaders in the policymaking and production regimes make sense of and resolve problems and thus improve national economic performance. Similarly, the institutional complementarity that knowledge regimes provide may break down as circumstances change. How all this happens depends on the nationally specific ways in which knowledge regimes are organized.

It is surprising that such a blind spot for knowledge regimes exists because a rich literature has emerged on how ideas matter for policymaking, and because some prominent representatives of the policymaking and production regime literatures, such as Peter Katzenstein and Peter Hall, respectively, have contributed to it!²⁵ Several researchers explored the conditions under which different types of ideas, such as policy programs, cognitive paradigms, public sentiments, and frames, influence policymaking.²⁶ Others addressed the methodologies by which this can best be studied.²⁷ However, this work largely ignores where these ideas come from in the first place and how knowledge regimes are important in that regard.

There is also much excellent work that in one way or another suggests that economic ideas conform to and influence the broader political economy in nationally specific ways. For instance, some scholars have studied why Keynesianism and then monetarism emerged and were adopted in different times and different ways across countries.²⁸ In particular, Peter Hall’s edited volume The Political Power of Economic Ideas is an important study of the diffusion of Keynesianism.²⁹ And Marion Fourcade-Gourinchas and Sarah Babb argued that the stagflation period was accompanied by the rise of neoliberal ways of thinking about economic policy and showed how economists played important roles in this in several countries.³⁰ Others have examined how neoliberalism emerged and diffused across less developed countries too thanks in part to the efforts of U.S. political and financial interests pushing the so-called Washington Consensus but with nationally specific results.³¹ Virtually all of these researchers argued that these ideas had to be translated and fit into national political and economic institutions. But to explain how this happened, they tended to focus on the activities of strategically placed politicians, technocrats, and professional economists—particularly academics—operating within a few state agencies, such as central banks and finance ministries. In other words, they had little to say about the policy research organizations many of these people inhabited or conversed with or how these organizations went about their business either individually or collectively.

Some scholars explored how in nationally specific ways policymakers framed various policy ideas in order to make them normatively palatable to the public.³² Yet the role of knowledge regimes was largely ignored—an important omission insofar as it is not just politicians and their handlers, but often organizations within knowledge regimes that created these frames in the first place and modified them if they were not effective.

A few researchers have written about independent, nonprofit, private think tanks. However, only a few of them discussed these organizations in connection with other types of policy research organizations, such as those associated with either the state or political parties, as an entire national field.³³ And with the exception of a few edited volumes, their work lacked cross-national comparisons.³⁴ Other researchers were more attentive to cross-national differences in how policy ideas were produced but only with examples from the early part of the twentieth century, when national political economies were vastly different from today. We have in mind here especially Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol’s collection titled States, Social Knowledge, and the Origins of Modern Social Policies.³⁵

Finally, some studies have shown how the economics profession developed and how this influenced some of the ideas to which policymakers were exposed in different countries. They too pay less attention than we would like to our principal concerns—how policy research organizations operate in the first place, and how policymaking and production regimes influence knowledge regimes.³⁶ For instance, Marion Fourcade’s excellent book Economists and Societies, which analyzed the development of the economics profession in France, Britain, and the United States, focused on the relationships between economists and universities but downplayed the role of economists in policy research organizations, particularly outside the state.³⁷

In short, although all these literatures are insightful, they shed less light than one might hope on how knowledge regimes are organized, operate, and vary across countries today and how they have evolved. The analysis of knowledge regimes is the linchpin that connects these disparate literatures. As such, the analysis of knowledge regimes constitutes the third analytic leg of a three-legged stool along with the analysis of policymaking and production regimes upon which comparative political economy should rest. Until now that leg has been largely missing. We correct this problem by showing that knowledge regimes are intimately connected with policymaking and production regimes in nationally specific ways. And in doing so, we offer two sets of insights into comparative political economy.

The first set is about policy paradigms. Paradigms are cognitive frameworks including core assumptions and causal arguments about which policies are effective in different situations—frameworks that constrain the range of policies that policymakers and others are likely to consider and support. Those who have studied the role of ideas in policymaking have discussed how one policymaking paradigm is replaced by another.³⁸ For instance, several researchers have argued that Keynesianism was replaced by neoliberalism in various countries since the 1970s. And they have frequently taken for granted that these paradigms are, as Grace Skogstad points out, internally coherent ideas that are … largely incommensurable with the paradigms that replace them.³⁹ In light of our evidence we argue against this view on two counts. First, paradigms are not hegemonic. One can exist alongside another in competition for long periods of time. Second, contrary to the implication of much of this literature, the shift from one paradigm to another does not involve an abrupt break but rather is an incremental and evolutionary process where bits and pieces of two or more paradigms may comingle in the analysis and policy prescriptions on offer.⁴⁰

Our second set of insights for comparative political economy pertains to the Varieties of Capitalism School. As we noted earlier, the Varieties of Capitalism School considers only complementarities involving policymaking and production regimes, whereas knowledge regimes are another possible source of institutional complementarity for the rest of the political economy. Indeed, our analysis shows that when people perceive that these complementarities break down—that is, that their knowledge regime no longer provides the analysis, advice, and other ideas deemed useful for making sense of and coping with their country’s political-economic problems—they try to change them in ways that they hope will rejuvenate such complementarity. And they do so in nationally specific ways that may involve, for instance, centralized planning or coordination, decentralized competition, trial-and-error experimentation, and haphazard muddling through. This is just what happened in our four countries as the Golden Age waned, globalization emerged, and people struggled to cope with stagflation and other problems. Three important implications follow from this insight. Complementarities are not fixed; they are dynamic. Efforts to create (or recreate) them are not necessarily successful despite their best intentions. And perception matters insofar as efforts to change knowledge regimes depend on people believing that their knowledge regimes have become dysfunctional in the first place. As such there is nothing automatic or mechanistic about this. And there are no functionally preordained outcomes. Ours is not a functionalist argument. Insofar as the Varieties of Capitalism School has been accused of functionalist reasoning, our research helps chart a way out of that dilemma.⁴¹ Moreover, we focus our attention on the breakdown of institutional complementarities and unpack how actors seek to make sense of and restore them in different ways in different countries—something that the Varieties of Capitalism School has largely neglected.

Recognizing the dynamic nature of the institutional complementarities associated with knowledge regimes can also help resolve what some consider to have been the Achilles’ heel of comparative political economy in general and the Varieties of Capitalism School in particular—lack of a satisfactory theory of change. A number of people have argued that researchers in these traditions have excelled in distinguishing between types of political economies and how they perform but that they have not done well in explaining how they change, especially in gradual or incremental ways.⁴² This is why, for example, Wolfgang Streeck, Kathleen Thelen, James Mahoney, and their colleagues have worked hard to identify different patterns and mechanisms of incremental change in advanced capitalist countries.⁴³ We contribute to this effort by showing that when people perceive a breakdown in institutional complementarity, their efforts to restore it can lead to significant incremental change. This is counter-intuitive insofar as scholars often argue that institutional complementarities are a source of stability whereas we show that they can also be a source of change.⁴⁴ However, we also show that the way this played out in our four knowledge regimes was nationally specific, which leads to our third argument—one that bears on convergence theory and the issue of national similarity.

Convergence Theory

In contrast to researchers in comparative political economy who emphasize the persistence of nationally specific institutional characteristics, other researchers have argued that these differences may fade under certain circumstances. Notably, many scholars have argued that globalization and the end of the Golden Age precipitated convergence—or isomorphism as it is often called—among countries in the advanced capitalist world. Convergence theory was pioneered in organizational and economic sociology by John Meyer and his colleagues who argued that a world culture or world polity has emerged by which nation-states have adopted similar organizational and institutional arrangements, norms, and ideas about how to configure political systems, state structures, educational systems, and the like. Nation-states did so, they argued, in order to cultivate legitimacy within the international community by doing what other leading nation-states and international organizations defined as being appropriate.⁴⁵ Others expanded on these insights, arguing that this occurred as a result of several causal mechanisms including the coercive power of international actors, such as the International Monetary Fund; the normative learning facilitated by nongovernmental organizations and professionals; or the mimicry by one nation-state of other prominent nation-states’ practices.⁴⁶ Typically, normative and mimetic mechanisms hold pride of place in these arguments, particularly when organizations in a field are uncertain about their environments and how to cope with them.⁴⁷ But in each case the result is the same—a tendency toward convergence.

Similarly, as noted above, some scholars have argued that the rise of globalization and the end of the Golden Age have been accompanied by a tendency toward convergence across nation-states on common neoliberal ideas where national governments, for instance, race to the bottom by competing against each other to attract and maintain investment capital by creating the most favorable investment climate possible with low taxes and limited government spending and regulation. Competition is the causal mechanism posited here.⁴⁸ But others have argued that the diffusion of neoliberalism has been driven too by coercive, normative, and mimetic mechanisms.⁴⁹

To be sure, all of this work has been very fruitful and generated lots of interesting research. But critics have identified two problems with it. First, much of it, especially by Meyer and his colleagues, albeit quite sophisticated methodologically, is a bit superficial insofar as it relies on the analysis of large cross-national datasets that do not permit digging deeply into how certain ideas or organizational and institutional structures and practices may take on nationally specific characteristics and maintain them over time. On closer inspection seemingly similar ideas, structures, and practices often vary quite a bit across countries—even when they are pushed upon nation-states by international organizations like the United Nations or European Union. Terrence Halliday and Bruce Carruthers, for example, found that even though a set of internationally accepted benchmarks for the development of bankruptcy law was devised in the late 1990s, the degree to which they were adopted by different nation-states varied widely depending on the political and economic institutions and circumstances of each country.⁵⁰

Second, researchers who establish that convergence has occurred often do not adequately substantiate their claims about which mechanisms have caused it: normative, mimetic, coercive, or competitive. Assumptions are often made, particularly that learning and copying are often involved, but little if any empirical evidence is provided to that effect. Thankfully, some recent scholarship has started to address this issue, but more work needs to be done.⁵¹

Our analysis of knowledge regimes documents that all four convergence mechanisms were at work in our cases. Moreover, they tended to operate in nationally specific combinations. There was much competitive mimicry and partisan coercion in the United States. State coercion and international normative and mimetic learning were especially pronounced in France. Coordinated normative and mimetic learning were evident in Germany. And consensus-based normative learning and state coercion were important in Denmark. More important, the results of those mechanisms differed significantly from what convergence theorists claim—that is, evidence of convergence was uneven and limited. Our cases show that each knowledge regime changed gradually and incrementally since the 1970s but that their evolution occurred in ways that were constrained by already existing political and economic institutions as well as the availability of certain resources. The U.S. knowledge regime remained competitive and bifurcated between clearly distinct public and private policy research organizations; the French knowledge regime remained largely statist; the German knowledge regime remained coordinated and continued to privilege semi-public research organizations; and the Danish knowledge regime continued to exhibit a remarkable orientation to negotiation, consensus making, and reasoned debate. In this regard our argument resembles those of researchers operating in the tradition of comparative political economy and sometimes the Varieties of Capitalism School who have shown that institutional change tends to be incremental and path-dependent thanks to a number of factors that limit the range of options from which people can choose when change is afoot.⁵² Put bluntly, then, insofar as our research is concerned convergence theories are right about the mechanisms of change but misleading about the outcomes.⁵³

A Model of the National Construction of Knowledge Regimes

With all of this in mind we can now present our model of the national construction of knowledge regimes—a model based on the comparative historical analysis presented in subsequent chapters. To begin with, knowledge regimes produce the analysis, advice, and other ideas that others have shown often influence public policy. But knowledge regimes themselves are shaped largely by the nationally specific policymaking and production regimes with which they are associated. Challenges to and changes in production and policymaking regimes often cause changes in knowledge regimes, which is not surprising insofar as institutional change in one area of a political economy can cause change in another particularly when people believe that institutional complementarities have broken down and try to renew them.⁵⁴ Extending Boyer’s insights, noted earlier, the breakdown of institutional complementarity is particularly evident when actors (1) perceive that the knowledge regime is no longer useful for policymakers trying to make sense of and solve economic problems and (2) take steps intentionally to change them in order to make them more useful. Perception and intention are the telltale signs.⁵⁵

However, knowledge regimes and the ideas they produce are not necessarily just simple reflections of material political and economic interests. Knowledge regimes may enjoy a degree of independence from the policymaking and production regimes depending on institutional and other circumstances. And there are no guarantees that even though actors try to change knowledge regimes they will succeed or their efforts will lead to more effective public policy. As a result, ours is not an argument about the functional inevitability of certain outcomes but rather an argument about the functional intentions of actors to build institutions and organizations that they hope will be useful. Even when people intend to behave rationally the social contexts within which they operate are often so complex and unpredictable that their intentions are not always fulfilled.⁵⁶ So ours is an institutional middle-ground argument that extends some of our earlier work on the international diffusion of neoliberalism and on the nature of ideas, policymaking, and institutional change.⁵⁷ In short, knowledge regimes are nationally specific constructions whose structure and practices are largely determined by—but not reducible to—the surrounding policymaking and production regimes.

Several very important clarifications are necessary. First, we cannot stress enough that ours is not a functionalist argument. Sometimes elites respond to a perceived breakdown of institutional complementarity through a centrally planned process where, for example, political leaders suspect that the policy research organizations upon which they rely no longer provide analysis and other ideas that are useful to them in coping with the country’s current problems and so they take steps to change and improve the situation. This might involve establishing brand-new types of policy research organizations or encouraging those that already exist to operate in different ways. In contrast to this top-down process, at other times responses may be much more decentralized and piece-meal. But regardless of how centralized or decentralized the response is it often involves much trial-and-error experimentation and casting about for ways to generate better policy analysis and other ideas. At best such muddling through allows people only to hope that whatever adjustments they make to the knowledge regime will in fact produce better ideas.⁵⁸ Put differently, even the best of intentions do not always produce the results envisioned. This is why there are no guarantees that the adjustments made—regardless of the nationally specific form they take—will necessarily improve the knowledge regime’s institutional complementarity vis-à-vis the rest of the political economy.

Second, we do not mean to suggest that the actors involved actually conceive of and articulate their problems as breakdowns of institutional complementarity. This is an analytic concept that we use to describe what happens and is based on our interpretations of the data at hand—particularly what people told us during interviews. Nor do we argue that their intentions are to change knowledge regimes in toto. The reality is that their reform efforts are generally much less encompassing and focus on some but certainly not all of the policy research organizations within their knowledge regimes. Again, this underscores the fact that the reform process is often much about piecemeal trial-and-error experimentation, puzzling, and muddling through.

Finally, ours is not a naïve view where all the ideas emanating from knowledge regimes necessarily influence policymakers. Things are messier than that. First, knowledge regimes are not monolithic but rather constellations of policy research organizations sometimes competing and sometimes cooperating with each other. So depending on their nationally specific institutional arrangements knowledge regimes may produce a variety of ideas from which policymakers may pick and choose. Second, these choices often depend not only on the persuasive powers of people in the knowledge regime but also on powerful political and economic interests. In other words, there is no guarantee that policymakers will rely on the analyses and ideas that knowledge regimes generate. Third, there are feedbacks in play. If policymakers choose to incorporate some of the ideas produced by knowledge regimes into policy, then these policies may have subsequent effects on the policymaking and production regimes themselves. Given all the causal complexities involved, evidence that knowledge regimes matter as an important source of institutional complementarity rests on our findings in each country that actors realized their knowledge regimes had become dysfunctional for the rest of the political economy and as a result tried to improve them.

The basic causal relationships are illustrated in figure 1.1. Our concern, however, as we have already explained, is not with these feedbacks or the direct impact of ideas on policymaking, which have already been explored by those arguing that ideas matter for public policymaking. Instead, our focus is largely on the initial nationally specific causal effects that policymaking and production regimes have on knowledge regimes and that knowledge regimes have on the ideas they produce. The relationships with which we are concerned are represented by the solid causal arrows in figure 1.1 as opposed to the dotted arrows, which represent the relationships that others have already studied. All of these relationships, of course, constitute some of the most important power dynamics in advanced capitalist countries insofar as actors in all three regimes struggle within various institutional and resource constraints to influence the production and dissemination of policy-relevant ideas. Policymaking and production regimes are in effect dynamic power structures that involve the mobilization of resources and that can change over time. So are knowledge regimes.

Our approach does not subscribe to a strictly Marxist, Gramscian, or otherwise materialist line of argument in which the ideas produced by knowledge regimes can somehow be reduced to powerful economic interests or otherwise represent the hegemonic interests of a ruling class.⁵⁹ To be sure, these interests are part of the story, although more so in some cases and at some times than others. But the influence of policymaking regimes, not to mention experts and analysts themselves, is too important to permit this sort of economic reductionism. Nor, however, do we subscribe to the opposite idealist position, such as that articulated by Karl Mannheim, who argued that sometimes idea producers are free-floating intellectuals immune from the influence of political and economic forces.⁶⁰ Adjudicating this debate is not our main concern. Nevertheless, we will address the issue occasionally because our evidence shows that things are more complicated than either of these views suggests and that the sharp distinction between materialist and idealist views is misguided. In other words, knowledge regimes may enjoy a degree of independence from the production and policymaking regimes depending on institutional circumstances.⁶¹ We will show, for example, that thanks to differences in the institutional configuration of production and policymaking regimes private money holds sway over knowledge regime activities more in the United States than in France. Independence also stems from the fact that knowledge regimes are populated in varying degree by experts and professionals. As others have shown, thanks to their professional norms experts often insist on a modicum of autonomy in their work and tend to resist excessive interference or control by political or economic elites.⁶² The independence of experts and professionals also depends on institutional circumstances and is perhaps most obvious in our German case where universities often work closely with policy research organizations. We will show as well that because the role of professional economic science became increasingly important in our knowledge regimes the knowledge producing function gradually gained more independence from the policymaking and production regimes, especially in France and Denmark.

Figure 1.1. The National Construction of Knowledge Regimes and Their Effects

Finally, policy research organizations do not operate in isolation from one another. Nor do knowledge regimes. As a result, structures, practices, and ideas may diffuse within and across knowledge regimes in ways that involve convergent tendencies. However, the manner in which this occurs is heavily mediated by the nationally specific arrangements of knowledge, policymaking, and production regimes. In particular, institutional and resource constraints limited the degree to which convergence occurred within and across our four knowledge regimes. Hence, despite mechanisms that may encourage convergence they do not necessarily result in convergence. Convergence may be blocked, and even if it is not it may still be partial and very uneven.

It is worth mentioning that there is also an emergent literature on social knowledge making to which our model and research speaks. This is an effort by scholars to understand how knowledge in the social sciences and humanities is produced. They are influenced by the sociology of knowledge literature and research in the production of knowledge in the natural sciences. This is a new field, and its proponents have called for research exactly along the lines we develop in this book. In particular, they have urged research into cross-national and historical variations in knowledge sites where people engage in a variety of knowledge producing practices that are influenced by other fields of actors in the political and economic environment. They have called as well for research into the interaction and interrelationships among knowledge sites to see whether there has been a diffusion and convergence across countries in knowledge and knowledge producing capacities.⁶³ These are issues that lie at the heart of this book and for which we offer many insights.

Knowledge Regimes, Globalization, and the End of the Golden Age

We will substantiate our analytic arguments through historical and comparative analyses showing that the knowledge regimes in the United States, France, Germany, and Denmark underwent significant changes in their structures and practices as a result of the political-economic crisis that erupted in the 1970s and 1980s. A bit of historical background is in order here, followed by a brief summary of each chapter that lies ahead.

As is well known, the 1970s and 1980s was a period when economic globalization was developing rapidly, and as a result, all the advanced capitalist countries experienced problems that brought the Golden Age of postwar twentieth-century capitalism to an end. The Golden Age was based on several things. First was a settlement between capital and labor. This took different forms in different countries, but the essence everywhere was an agreement to link wage increases to productivity growth. The resulting wage restraint helped bolster retained earnings, which provided investment necessary for growth. Second, welfare states were built up as a protection against unemployment and other social ills and, following Keynesian principles, as a vehicle for stimulating demand and therefore economic growth. Third, the United States was the world’s postwar hegemonic economic power. It pursued macroeconomic policies that stimulated demand in America, which provided a market for foreign imports that helped bolster economic growth overseas. Moreover, U.S. foreign direct investment in Europe also helped spur economic growth there. Fourth, all of this was carried out in an environment of international currency stability thanks to the Bretton Woods system of